Graphics Reviews

Review: Silver Efex Pro

If you’re serious about working in black and white, you need to be serious about the tools you use to convert your color photographs to grayscale. Silver Efex gives you the power you need with the ease of use you want.

Review: Capture NX 2

Version 2 brings important upgrades to this innovative image editor, including major interface revisions, workflow improvements, and important new editing tools.

Review: Epson Stylus Photo R1900

Looking for a printer that can output a wide range of print sizes for $500 or less? This review may be your answer. You won’t find another printer that produces glossy output this good for under $2,000!

Review: Nik Software's Viveza

This plug-in is ideal for anyone who regularly creates complex masks.

Reviews: Alien Skin Exposure 2.0 and Imagenomic Real Grain

Whether you want to digitally reproduce the look of different film stocks or convert color shots to grayscale, one of these plug-ins may be just what you need.

Review: PhotoTune Software's SkinTune 2.0

If you routinely shoot portraits or photograph in difficult mixed lighting situations, check out this Photoshop plug-in.

Review: Adobe Photoshop CS3

There are high-school seniors who have never lived in a world without Photoshop. Does this venerable application still have room for improvement?

Review: Adobe Illustrator CS3

The new Illustrator is faster, flashier, and more colorful, yes. But is it worth the upgrade? Read on to find out.

Review: Corel Painter X

With amazing brushes that are more realistic than ever, new composition tools for painters and photographers, and a little man inside the software who paints for you (!), this Painter upgrade is worth the money.

Review: HVC Color Composer

This Photoshop plug-in adds an intuitive color selection tool that will save time and money -- once you grasp its complexity.

Review: Alien Skin Blow Up

Do Photoshop's upsampling tools give you the jaggies? When you need to enlarge images, Blow Up may be the helping hand you've been looking for.

Review: CorelDraw X3 Graphics Suite

With new and improved tools in CorelDraw, Photo-Paint, and PowerTrace, this is one sweet suite.

Review: Apple's Aperture 1.0

Apple's first-ever pro photography tool generated a lot of buzz when it was first announced. Ben Long spent weeks putting the shipping version of Aperture through all sorts of tests. In this thorough review, he reveals whether the reality lives up to the buzz.

Review: Wacom Cintiq 21UX Interactive Pen Display

It's a display you can draw on. It's a tablet you can surf the Web with. And it comes with a sophisticated pen and lots of bundled software. But is it right for you?

Review: Adobe Illustrator CS2

Adobe's vector-art creation tool comes alive, learns a few new tricks, and leads the pack.

Review: Adobe Photoshop CS2

The market leader continues to innovate while polishing features that have been around for a while. Ben Long takes you through the newly released program.

Canon i9900 Photo Printer: Fast, Affordable, Great Quality

Canon's new compact i9900 Photo Printer is a triple threat: it quickly produces richly colored prints up to 13 x 19 inches at a price point of less than $500.

Strata 3D CX: Familiar Application in Changing Times

This easy-to-use 3D application sticks to its roots and renders great-looking pictures. Native Photoshop file support makes it even more accessible for graphic designers, but power users will find Strata 3D CX's modeler lackluster.

Paint Shop Pro 9: A Digital Photographer's Dream Image Editor

Many digital camera buffs find Adobe Photoshop to be too complex and too costly for many basic image-editing tasks. Jasc's Paint Shop Pro 9 offers a real alternative with powerful image correction tools and new natural media brushes. And at $119, the price is right, too.

Eye Candy 5: Extra Textures for Photoshop

Alien Skin has updated Eye Candy 5 by breaking the plug-ins package into three collections. The first to be released, Textures, shows some improvements over the previous release, but is it enough?